FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 29, 2026

Arts at Delicious at The Dunbar:

Live Jazz Opens The Music Stayed: Past, Present & Future Frequencies – The art of Skira Martinez at the Historic Dunbar Hotel

Twelve sculptures and collages built from salvaged piano keys, speakers and tape decks bring the hardware of Black music history back to Central Avenue. Opening day Sunday, November 1, 2:30–4:30 PM. Free.

LOS ANGELES, October 29, 2026. La Mancha Gallery will open The Music Stayed: Past, Present & Future Frequencies – The art of Skira Martinez with a live jazz set on Sunday, November 1, from 2:30 to 4:30 PM at Delicious at The Dunbar, inside the Historic Dunbar Hotel at 4229 S. Central Avenue. The artist will attend. Admission is free, and the exhibition runs through January 30, 2027.

Skira Martinez builds with what other people threw away. Piano keys that stopped sounding years ago, blown speaker heads, a vintage tape player, a salvaged cymbal and a few afro combs become twelve works about Black music and the places that kept it alive. The show moves in three parts. Cultural Memory honors the women of the early blues, the after-dark juke joint and the dance floor. Transformation follows how music gets remade, closing on a three-foot shadow box for Thelonious Monk lined with coffee- and tobacco-stained music paper. Future Frequencies imagines the people who come next, assembled from speaker heads and amplifier parts. One of them, Master Blaster, carries a working speaker in its chest.

“I am particularly drawn to the space where the ancestral and the futuristic meet,” Skira Martinez writes in her artist statement. “I do not see them as opposites.”

The work starts close to home. Skira Martinez lives and works in South Central Los Angeles, where she founded CIELO galleries/studios, and her practice comes out of an off-grid childhood where things got fixed and reused instead of thrown out. Sustainability isn’t a theme laid on top of the work. It’s how the pieces get made: she starts from what her neighborhood discards and gives it a second life as art about music.

The Dunbar is a fitting room for that conversation. The hotel opened in 1928 as the Hotel Somerville and became the center of Central Avenue’s jazz era, a home for the Black musicians and travelers the rest of the city turned away. It was named Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 131 in 1974 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, and it still hosts live jazz every Sunday.

“Skira takes what South Central throws away and turns it into a record of the music that came out of this part of the city including The Dunbar Hotel. Her neighborhood, sustainability and the music are in every piece, and there’s no better room to show that than the Dunbar on a Sunday with a band playing,” said Omar Holguin, Founder & Curator of La Mancha Gallery.

After opening day, the exhibition is on view during restaurant hours, with live jazz every Sunday from 2:30 to 4:30 PM and a different performer each week.

Event details

• What: Opening day, The Music Stayed: Past, Present & Future Frequencies – The art of Skira Martinez
• When: Sunday, November 1, 2026, 2:30–4:30 PM. Exhibition on view through January 30, 2027
• Where: Delicious at The Dunbar, Historic Dunbar Hotel, 4229 S. Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90011
• Admission: Free. Table reservations recommended: lamancha.events/delicious
• Hours: Mon, Wed & Thu 10 AM–9 PM · Fri & Sat 10 AM–10 PM · Sun 10 AM–7 PM · Tue closed
• Getting there: Small lot behind the restaurant. Metro Bus lines 53 and 105 stop at Central and 42nd; the A Line’s Vernon Station is about a fifteen-minute walk
• Images: High-resolution images available on request

About Skira Martinez

Skira Martinez is a Los Angeles artist working in sculptural assemblage, collage and installation, almost entirely with salvaged material. She grew up off-grid on a farm, where repair and reuse were part of daily life. She founded CIELO galleries/studios in Historic South Central Los Angeles and has exhibited at Watts Towers Arts Center, Avenue 50 Studio, Mercado La Paloma, Band of Vices and the Central Avenue Jazz Festival Arts Pavilion. Instagram: @skira.cielo

About La Mancha Gallery and Arts @ Delicious

La Mancha Gallery is an independent curatorial platform founded in 2006 by Omar Holguin. Working through its Alternative Venue Exhibition Model, it brings exhibitions into the places where people already gather across Los Angeles, and it has curated the Arts Pavilion at the Central Avenue Jazz Festival for twelve years. Arts @ Delicious is its rotating exhibition series at Delicious at The Dunbar, produced in partnership with Adriana Cortes. Each show runs for a season, alongside the restaurant’s Mexican and soul fusion menu and its Sunday jazz. lamancha.events

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LOCATION
Delicious at The Dunbar
4229 South Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90011

If you would like more information about this topic, please contact Omar Holguin at (626) 425-8300 or email at omar@lamancha.events